“Mm,” said Yahweh, and then we all headed back into Halcyon to use the portal system.
I lingered at the entrance, for Zira. He had strayed behind the others, trudging slowly down the dunes. His regenerated right fist curled and relaxed at his side, eyes cast to the ground. He looked lost.
I was a little taken aback by his reaction to losing Sapphire (if that was indeed what was making him so upset, but what else was there?), as up until a few days ago he had appeared indifferent to her membership at the Court. Then again, Zira was always reticent. Knowing him completely was an impossible feat.
“Too many,” he said upon reaching me, as if having read my mind. “I’ve lost too many.”
I’ve lost too many to ever dare to get close, was what I took from his lament. I had made him get closer to Sapphire. He had bonded with her through empathy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. He didn’t respond, only shrugged. I turned to leave, but he grabbed my arm.
“Wait.”
I froze, looking back at him.
Zira closed his eyes and sighed. “Synch with me.”
“Right now? But—”
“You need to understand. I should have done it when you and Sapphire did, but…” Again, he sighed. “Just do it.”
I hesitated. “Alright.”
***
DEJECTION
Ziranel Throm
I HADN’T BEGUN MY EXISTENCE AS A highborn like the rest of you. The Court of Enigmus housed important people—some having questionable ethics prior to their arrival, but I digress—with impressive curriculum vitae. But not me.
I was a defect, born from a poor and uncaring family that abandoned my brother and I when we were children. Our town was impoverished, as was the rest of the Firian Province. A tyrannical government with a penchant for greed and corruption saw to that. Those who could afford it left our ramshackle home the moment an opportunity arose, so most of the population consisted of sick elderly, orphaned children or young adults. No prospects, no future, no hope.
My mother had been an adolescent prostitute, my father a socca pusher from a town over. She had taken socca from a makeshift inhaler through most of her pregnancy with me. As a consequence I was born flawed.
There were many flawed children around, but the others could get by from selling socca themselves, thievery or somehow landing an actual labor job and gaining reasonable accommodations. My flaw was disfigurement. Moving around was difficult, and only got worse through the years. By the time I was out of childhood and into mid-adolescence I was forced to use a small wagon to push myself around. The roads weren’t maintained and most days the rains left them a muddy bog. Hundreds of times I’d gotten stuck in the mud, only for children to laugh at me and throw garbage. I was forced to sit there and take it, clutching my sack of empty cans and bottles to send to the collector later for enough money to eat. Sometimes the children took the bag, and I’d have to go without until the next day. Eventually someone older would come along and shoo the children away. They would push my wagon out of the mud and to drier grounds, offering a smile of pity.
After taking all that I could carry in my wagon to the collector, I stopped at one of the few merchant stores left in the neighborhood. A day’s rummaging usually got me two small meat pies and some flavored water. There wasn’t much agriculture in the area, as the town was created a century ago for mining. The veins of rich metals had since dried up and all that was left was a few generations of its impoverished who couldn’t afford to leave.
I would bring the pies and drink home to share with my older brother, who had spent his day working masonry outside of town. At dawn he would walk ten miles to the fields where they built summer houses for richer communities, and make the trek back in the darkness with enough money for bread and a small sack of beans. Breakfast.
I often feared one day he would cut his losses and leave, too. Miraculously he was not defective, but strong and made well. Although he never said it I knew that I was a hindrance to him. He could have left town and carved his own path in life; but every night he would come back to the grimy shack we called our home, and every night he would dress my blistered, gnarled hands and feet after placing a sack of beans and bread on the floor next to his cot.
But tonight was different. He seemed tenser than usual. Even with the difficulty of our lives, he was always gentle and patient. Not tonight, though. My brother was evidently worried about something. I could sense the tension in his posture and the way his jaw set over and over again.
I asked what was wrong as he dressed my wounds, but he didn’t tell me until the beans were boiling in a pot over the fire and we’d finished the meat pies.
“The other masons are talking about no one wanting anymore houses,” he told me, chewing on his lip, an anxious sign. “They say the Vaggas are claiming territory in Shiekhl and scaring people away. Another civil war is breaking out, I bet.”
Civil war was not an uncommon occurrence in Firia, but never so close to our town, or Shiekhl. Local government was normally able to stave it off further north. Vaggas were nomadic tribes of criminals that had banded together to form a sort of rebel community. They had never come this far because there was nothing to offer. Now with the growing community of the rich building homes and economizing the area, it had caught their attention. If our town was invaded, there wasn’t anyone to stop them. We were barely a town, more of a suburban slum of Shiekhl that no one paid attention to.
I didn’t respond and stirred the beans, grimacing from the pain of doing such a simple task. They were still tough and our firewood was running out.
“I’ll find something else,” he promised, detecting my worry.
“There is nothing else here,” I muttered, “aside from helping me collect garbage or pushing socca.”
“At least then I can help you out of the muck,” he said with a grin, trying to be funny. All it did was stir up traumatizing thoughts of those children.
“Or we could leave,” I offered.
My brother shook his head. “Nowhere to go. Not for us.”
Not for me, he meant. I only lowered my gaze on the bubbling pot. “The beans are ready.”
“Good,” he sighed, happy to change the subject.
I went to bed that night, worried about tomorrow.
The next day, I heard from a small crowd of customers that Vaggas attacked the outer boundaries of Shiekhl that morning. We could see thin plumes of smoke rising from the tree line that bordered our town.
That night, my brother didn’t come back.
He never came back again.
*
It wasn’t more than a week before Vagga conflicts slid into our boundaries. The place my brother had worked to build was looted and those brave enough to stay were thrown from their excessive homes and murdered in the streets.
I continued as usual, having no other option, pushing myself atop the wagon collecting litter in my sack as gunfire and screams echoed in the distance. At the turn of the season, all of the merchants closed shop and headed for the hills. Even the socca pushers left the area, having lost most of their clients. Without my brother to dress my wounds, the sores became dirty and I fell ill with infection. I tried my best to do it on my own, but my fingers were too swollen and gnarled to do a decent job.
Then the day came that I was too sick to get out of my cot. It was the first time in my life that I cried, despite everything. I resigned myself to fate, delirious with fever, covered in filth from both collecting garbage and soiling myself during sleep. It was better that I die. In fact I hoped to die before waking again.
But I did wake again. And when I did, someone was knelt over me.
A man.
No one from here; no one from anywhere I’d seen, as limited a scope as that was.
I shivered as he felt my sweat-drenched forehead. I felt ashamed of the piss and shit and filth that he could probably smell. All he did was watch me with a sad look on his face. It wasn’t pity, but ge
nuine sadness. For some reason that made everything so much worse.
He wore a black uniform with a strange emblem that was on fire. His long dark hair shadowed most of his face, obscuring his features, but his eyes shined silver through all the darkness.
“Would you like to make a deal?” he asked; his voice was soft, gentle.
I had no idea what he wanted from me. I was a dying cripple, no good to anyone. I didn’t answer, shuddering with fear and uncertainty. It was difficult to see clearly, and if I’d had food in my stomach I most certainly would have retched.
“I can heal you,” he went on. “All of the rot inside your body will be gone. You’ll be able to walk. More than that, even. Is that something you want?”
“W-Who are you?” I managed, wondering now if this was just a hallucination, or a vivid fever-dream.
“Someone that can make your life meaningful,” he said. He tilted his head and flashed me a warm smile. “I don’t normally take people like you, but…” His eyes drifted over my withering form. He didn’t finish that sentence. “So, do we have a deal?”
Even if this was a dream, it might as well be a good dream. “Yes. W-What must I do?”
“Vow to serve me. From now on you’ll always be taken care of.”
I nodded, no longer having the strength to speak. I felt the weight of the cot as I drifted out of consciousness, right before a warm hand pressed against the center of my chest.
If this was death, it wasn’t nearly as frightening as I’d thought.
***
Pariah Andosyni—;
Once Zira broke synchronization with me, I recoiled. That brief amount of time had felt like years. His pain still radiated down my fingers and through my knuckles, being the last sensation to fade with our severance.
Zira mistook my response for revulsion, and looked away. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“No, wait—”
He only shook his head and disappeared into Halcyon’s depths. I was left standing there, flabbergasted at knowing what Zira had been. It explained a lot of things. Everything, actually. I would never look at him the same.
And, unbeknownst to Zira, that was entirely a good thing.
XXII
ANODIZED
Qaira Eltruan—;
FROM SARINE’S PAINFULLY LONG EXPOSITION I gathered that the Framers were a proud race of xenophobes, whose sole motivation for killing unwitting outsiders was to prevent their own deposition. Unfortunately for them they were on borrowed time despite all the efforts and genocide, and the irony of it was that they had created their own competitors.
When she’d finally closed her mouth for the first in what seemed like hours, she looked at me expectantly, like I would start revealing everything about me and mine. And perhaps I would have, if not for several minutes ago when Leid had somehow broken through our conscious stream and did what no Vel’Haru—noble or otherwise—had done prior. She spoke to me telepathically, in this universe.
—I’ve found you. Sit tight.
Thank the fucking stars.
For whatever reason Sarine didn’t seem to pick up on Leid’s message. I knew that they used something similar to us in terms of attica, what they called the ‘grid’, but it must have been exclusive to their resonance. This bolstered the idea that although we were the same, we were also very different.
“You know, I used to be like you,” I began, crossing my arms and staring idly at the Halon system, still cast in the center of the room. “Afraid of change. Afraid of outsiders. Afraid of progress. But that made sense for me, since I was from a rock-slinging low-civ and not a universal governing entity.” My eyes slid toward Sarine, relishing the look of surprise on her face. It was the most emotion I’d ever seen her wear. “So, who exactly is this Codemaker asshole? You seem to follow his rules without logic, like lessers do with religion. Is that what you are? Religious?”
There was no translatable term for religion apparently, because Sarine was confused. “The Codemaker has kept us and alpha-Insipia safe for millennia.”
“He’s kept your heads in the sand.” Again, no translatable phrase for that. This was getting frustrating. “Why can’t you go out into the multiverse? Have you ever stopped to think that if you were capable of creating simulated universes, couldn’t someone else have created this one?”
“You agreed to tell your story if I told mine,” she reminded me, evidently tired of my third-degree.
I gave her a mean grin. “Yeah, that won’t be necessary anymore.”
“Must I remind you that deception comes with a price?”
“The reason you want me to tell our story is so that you can find out more about her.” I shrugged. “Like I said, that isn’t necessary anymore.”
“And why is that?”
“Because she’s on her way.”
***
Regalis Sarine-375—;
Because she’s on her way.
He’d said that with a gleam of malice in his eyes. This had been the plan all along. He didn’t realize what I was trying to do. If I’d been able to prove they were on the same level of intellect as us, if I’d been able to show that they meant us no harm—;
But now, all of it was for naught.
More importantly than that, how was she on her way? How could she possibly locate us if we were in an immersion sequence? This dimension wasn’t even accessible to our midciv subjects. Not without a chaperone.
“You don’t understand,” I said, trying to make him see reason. I fell into the Grid to locate Lassiter and Lelain, except they were no longer active in Avadara. They were no longer active anywhere. No.
Shatterstar, I’d told him not to do this. I’d told him.
“I understand perfectly well,” said Qaira, his expression falling into a scowl. “You want to wipe us out for no other reason than being a possible threat.”
“Regals want to wipe you out, not me. Why do you think you’re still alive? This is not business as usual. I am trying to show them that you are not a threat.”
He laughed in spite of me. “Trying to show that we’re not a threat by nearly killing our Queen and kidnapping her husband? You started this with violence, it will end with violence.”
Qaira was her lover. Wonderful.
The room flickered then, the simulated scenery flitted in and out of reality. The pressure in the room increased, enough to feel a compression at my temples. I thought of killing him then, although that would only disprove my intentions even more. If Lelain and Lassiter were no more, surely that meant she could do away with me, too.
Or not. But I didn’t want to fight.
“Since I’m a man of my word, let me give you some cliff notes,” said Qaira, taking a step forward, narrowing his eyes. “We are the apex race of the Multiverse, having bypassed your Codebreaker sequence. The only thing limiting us now is you.”
A burst of fractal light at the center of the room made me turn. The light melded into a shape, and then took form. There she was, her angry anodized-violet eyes burning a hole right through me. Before anything could be said, she snapped her fingers and Qaira disappeared.
I steeled my expression, suppressing the shock of her abilities. There were many things these Vel’Haru were making me feel; things I hadn’t felt for as long as I could remember. Generations ago, most likely.
She said nothing, staring up at me, as if expecting something. We studied each other marveling at our similarities and differences. Her morphology was different than Qaira’s. They were not a unified species like the other hybrids we’d come across. They were… an umbrella species. Not many of those existed here.
“What happened to the envoy?” I asked.
“Your emissaries had terrible manners,” she said, unblinking. “They killed one of mine, so now they are broken statues buried in Halcyon’s desert.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Leid Koseling, Queen of the Court of Enigmus. You are Regalis Sarine, 375th generation of Halon IV.”
“How…?”
“One of your emissaries was kind enough to lend me his knowledge. I’ve synchronized with your Grid. I know everything about you, and yours.”
Shatterstar. “And what happens now, then?”
Leid smiled sweetly, though the intention behind it was anything but. The emblazoned crest on her battle-armor intensified, as if foreshadowing what was to come. “What happens is entirely up to you. I offer a truce. Allow us passage into alpha-Insipia and to live here undisturbed. We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us.”
Authority would never stand for that. “If you know everything, then you must know I’m not the deciding factor upon such a request.”
Leid sighed lightly. “You are a deciding factor. I don’t appreciate games, Regal.”
“I’m not playing games. I am the only one within Authority who has confidence that you are not a threat. You are proving me wrong.”
“Your envoy proved you wrong. In fact they proved that you are the threat. If you think I could allow your subjects to hurt my own without retaliation, then perhaps a truce is a waste of time.”
“Authority will not allow for a truce.”
The space around Leid rippled with particle excitation. I could see the violet haze emanating from her form and I shrank backward. “Tell your Authority that my offer still stands, but only for a limited time.”
An explosion of force broke the submersion, shattering the simulation like a mirror. I felt myself falling backward through darkness, hitting something solid.
Snap.
XXIII
BALLAST
Yahweh Telei—;
THE COUNCIL ROOM HAD A strange air to it. Sapphire’s seat was empty, Qaira’s now filled, but the mood was melancholy, uneasy. It was an unusual atmosphere, less familiar than the pensive and anticipatory one that had filled these walls up until now.
Dysphoria: Rise (Hymn of the Multiverse 6) Page 18